“This country needs a therapist. White men [are] losing their power to brown women and it’s freaking them out.” Michele Stern

Last week, for the first time in eleven years, the House of Representatives voted to censure a member. This is a big deal, it turns out, and it has only happened eight times in the last hundred years. It got me wondering what the other centureés did. When I look at pictures of an old white man dressed in a suit with a starched collar, I default to smart, thoughtful, guy; I am reminded of both my grandfathers. But reading through several of the old cases has changed my mind. Not surprisingly, the House of Representatives has a long history of nasty rubes and Republican Paul Representative Gosar seems to be one of them.

That’s not completely surprising since Cozar represents a big chunk of Arizona’s boondocks, his district has been drawn to leave out both Phonix and Flagstaff to make it even more boondocky. In an act of petty meanness Gozar posted an anime video depicting himself killing Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. I have not seen the video – and, believe me, I tried – but nobody, including Gosar himself, denies that it depicts him killing AOC so I am going to go with that. The whole thing is so bizarre, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I can’t imagine a situation in which doing something like that would be acceptable, well, maybe two close friends with a history of teasing each other, but when else? In this case, they are not friends, and AOC has a history of being threatened by various right-wing haters. Serious enough threats that the Secret Service, FBI, and Capitol Police were brought in, more than once.

Gosar, in his defense, said that it was a joke, he meant no harm, and that AOC doesn’t have a sense of humor. I guess he thought it was a joke, but it was either a thoughtless, nasty, joke and Gosar should be kicked out of Congress because he is too stupid to make even basic decisions or it was meant to harm AOC. Either way, if this happened in the private sector, I’m sure Gosar would be fired.

What I find most disturbing about Gozar’s so-called joke is not the anime – it’s not surprising that there is a jerk in Congress – but that all but two Republican Representatives voted against censure. All but two Republican members of Congress think it is pretty much OK to make and post a video of yourself killing another member of Congress. The two Republican women who spoke sort of ignored the whole death threat joke thingy and complained about the process and the speed at which punishment had been served. Speaker McCarthy rambled on for close to three hours saying nothing particularly germane. And Representative Ocasio-Cortez gave another great speech cutting to the core of the problem. Give it a listen.

I know a lot of people who regret getting the vaccine. Don’t know anyone who regrets not getting it. A Tweet by Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

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That’s it, the Tweet and the picture – together – are the joke. If you get it, you are smarter or better educated or just funnier than me, because I sure didn’t get it. I’m not sure that I even knew it was intended as a joke. But it was and it is.

Probably the place to start was with the Jews being hounded out of Europe by the Nazis. Obviously, not all the Jewish people were able to leave Europe, or even wanted to, with over six million Jewish people murdered solely for the crime of being Jewish. But a large number of Jewish people did get out and, ironically, many of them contributed to the Allies eventually beating the Nazis. One of them was a Hungarian Jewish mathematician named Abraham Wald. Wald managed to get to the US and ended us taking a job at Columbia as head of the Statistics Department. Like many immigrants, the job was below what his pay grade would have been back home, but it was a job. When the United States entered the war, Wald ended up in a wartime organization known as The Statistical Research Group and it was there that he made a major contribution to the Allied war effort.

The Statistical Research Group worked on problems like how to streamline the supply chain for material going to the Battlefield or the trajectory of bullets fired by a moving airplane and, according to the mathematician and author, Jordan Ellenberg, was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the fourth-smartest person in the room. In mid-1943, or so, the military brought the airplane picture above to Abraham Wald with a question in armoring airplanes.

Armour is weight and weight is the enemy of a successful fighter plane: too much armor and the plane is too slow, and too little armor results in a plane being too vulnerable to enemy fire. The military told Wald that “The red dots are bullet holes; this is where our planes are being shot.” And they asked him, “What is the minimum amount of armor needed to protect these areas?” Wald gave them an answer they did not expect. He said, “Put the armor where there are no bullet holes.”

The planes that got hit where there are no bullet holes, didn’t come back. Statistically, this is known as survival bias. I only know one person, that I’m aware of, that refuses to take the vaccine and he hasn’t died or even gotten sick and offers this as proof that people shouldn’t be taking the vaccine. I’m sure he will feel this way as long as he remains Covid-free. Survival Bias.

 

It has been about two weeks since I last wrote here and it is raising my level of angst. It’s not like nothing has happened during that time, or that I haven’t thought about it, but, for some reason, unknown to me, I could never string together an interesting series of comments.

Mort Saul died last month and I wanted to say something, but what? I was a big fan of Saul’s but I haven’t seen or even heard of him for years so Saul’s dying, in Mill Valley at 94, was a shook mostly because I didn’t even know he was still alive. At first glance, dying at 94 seems like a pretty good run, but Saul actually died, as a comedian, when he became obsessed with the President Jack Kennedy Assassination and was canceled. Still, he was the most famous and successful comedian in the country for a while and he revolutionized stand-up. Before Saul, comedians told jokes, Saul riffed on the news, ad-libbing – well, seemingly ad-libbing – making comments on the day’s news from the folded newspaper he carried.

Today, Dave Chappell seems the most like Saul and, like Saul, people are campaigning to cancel Chappell over one, or, maybe, several. of his riffs. In Chappell’s case, it is his remarks in his last Stand up gig for Netflix, The Closer, on transgender people that got him in trouble. I’ve watched The Closer twice and, while Chapell makes several jokes at the expense of trans-people, to my ear, he is never is degrading. Just funny. I think, as importantly, both Saul and Chappell own up to what they have said, they know their jokes should be funny and, if that humor offends somebody, they don’t try to brush it off as “I was only joking.”

That is not the case with, say, the new “Go Brandon” meme that is making the rounds with some Conservative politicians and pundits in Washington. “Go Brandon” somehow became code for “Fuck Biden” but when challenged, the pundits brushed it off as “Just a joke.” But no joke is just a joke, every joke has a target, every joke is commenting on something, even a joke as unfunny as “Go Brandon”, and to brush it off is just a sign of cowardice.

Lastly, here are some pictures I took a couple of weeks ago. While we were at Michele’s family cabin in Olympic Valley, we drove down to Lone pine on Highway 395 and then back up into the mountains on the Cottonwood Pass Road to a little over 10,000 feet, to see what the Sierras looked like with their new dusting of snow.

I’m just passing this on without any comment. Give it a watch. 

We are at Michele’s family’s mountain cabin in what was formally known as Squaw Valley. When we got here, the Truckee River was almost dry with shallow pools of standing water, and the creek behind Michele’s place was even drier. Then it started to rain and rain and rain, just constant, heavy, rain for two days. During that time, the creek went from “Oh, good, there’s water in the Creek.” to “Holy shit, the creek might jump its banks.” Sunday, we spent the day watching Max Verstappen beat Lewis Hamilton in a tight race at the United States Grand Prix and running to the windows to watch the Creek rise. Sunday, as the light started to fade, the rain changed to snow, just as Weather Underground predicted and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

After two days of listening to the constant sound of rain on the roof and the roar of the Creek, the snow brought a welcome silence with big snowflakes floating down like the remnants of a pillow fight covering the landscape. In one night, late summer has changed to winter.

Local lore says that this area has been called Squaw Valley since the 1850s when a couple of white explorers came across a group of Indigenous women working in the meadow. A hundred years later, Alex Cushing named his new ski resort after the valley. At the time of the ski resort naming, Cushing – and many of the rest of us – probably did not consider it a racial or sexual slur, but the local members of the Washoe Tribe do and they have been working to get it changed.

Now the owners of the ski area have renamed the ski area Palisades Tahoe which has left the valley below the ski area is sort of in a linguistic limbo. Because Squaw Valley has been a  census-designated place located near Fresno, California, since 1879, the valley below the Ski Resort has always had an official postal address of Olympic Valley. The rub is that everybody, from out-of-town skiers to the locals, calls Olympic Valley Squaw Valley or just Squaw, and very few people want to change. They feel that they have been calling it Squaw their entire lives and, since they do not mean it as a slur, they should have the right to call it what they want.

I don’t hold that position, I think that anybody and everybody has the right to determine what offends them. If somebody calls me a heeb, I have the right to be offended and, if the person calling me a heeb says that they don’t mean it as a slur, that doesn’t trump my right to be offended. They can continue to call me that – their right is even enshrined in the US Constitution – but they’ll be demonstrating that they don’t care about my feelings. In effect, they’ll be declaring that they either want to offend me or, at best, don’t give a shit about me.

I realize that this is also somewhat of a slippery slope. When people started tearing down statues of southern secessionists, or traitors if you prefer, I understood their anger, but when people started talking about changing the name of Sir Francis Drake Blvd*, I was taken back at first. But if the original settlers, the Coastal Miwok, find that name offensive, I think we should change it to a more neutral name. I don’t know how far into the rabbit-hole we should follow this string of thought but there is no doubt that we white people have labeled the landscape in a ratio out of proportion to our number (and actual contributions). That that labeling is now being challenged is not always an easy concept to accept.

*I originally wrote St. Francis but Gina Matesic pointed out that I had the wrong dude.